Aquinas on the Trinity: Faith, Reason and Method: an examination of Saint Thomas Aquinas' methodology in his Trinitarian theology and an evaluation of its modern critics

Abstract

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the position that the one God is also three persons, can be seen as the embodiment of some of the deep paradoxes lurking at the heart of Christianity. It is, at once, both the central Christian mystery, providing, along with the Incarnation doctrine, the distinguishing feature of the faith, as well as a possible throwback to the triadic conceptions of deity found throughout the myths, philosophies and religions of the pre-Christian, 'pagan' world. It is a doctrine that seems to be irretrievably riddled with logical contradictions, yet it has been stoutly defended, and held as perfectly reasonable to believe, by some of the great minds of Christian apologetics and western philosophy. It has remained a central point of virtually all Christian theology since the Reformation, and the advent of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, despite the exceedingly limited exposition of a triune deity able to be found in scriptural sources and the total absence of the word 'Trinity' in the Holy Bible. It is, in short, one of the strangest and most troublesome of Christian doctrines.

This 'strangeness' of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the issues surrounding it, can be seen to a great extent in the Trinitarian theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), as it appears, in its fullest form, in the Summa Theologica, and the various responses it has elicited in the eight centuries since it was written. Although Aquinas' work on the Trinity, in its privileged position as representative of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, will never be short of champions, there has, especially in recent times, been a considerable amount of criticism levelled at its numerous tenets, general structure and mode of enquiry. Aquinas, and the tradition he represents, has been labelled variously as irrelevant, over-philosophical, unnecessarily complex and, most tellingly I feel, unbiblical. It is my opinion that these criticisms, although perhaps valid in some senses, are laid on Aquinas rather hastily. The critics of Aquinas' position, often in the midst of expounding some full-scale theological system of their own, dismiss Aquinas and traditional Latin Trinitarianism1 out of hand, without the hint of a proper engagement with what Aquinas was trying to do and the project of enquiry that Latin Trinitarianism represents. They do not take into account the complexity of the methods and dialectic that Aquinas sets up, effectively attacking a straw man. I will attempt here to redress this imbalance and paint a more nuanced picture of what Aquinas was actually attempting to say in his writings on the Trinity.